State Struggles to Retain Its Allure as Science Center : Technology: Officials hope to locate an antimatter lab at Stanford, helping rebuild California’s research base.
Staggered by a five-year slump in which the state has failed to attract major new science projects and has lost thousands of high-technology jobs, California is fighting to hang on to the latest major federal research project--an antimatter research center that originated in the Bay Area.
Researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center are competing with Cornell University in Upstate New York be hosts of a federally funded, $195-million physics project seeking to explain why matter--not oppositely charged antimatter--dominates the universe.
The California Council on Science and Technology has said this project--awkwardly named the Asymmetric B Factory because it would create millions of subatomic particles called B mesons to learn more about how they decay--is a high priority in its campaign to rebuild the state’s research base. Gov. Pete Wilson’s office has actively campaigned to bring the project to Stanford.
Having lost out on several high-profile science projects that either originated or were designed in the state--from the National Earthquake Center to the Sematech computer-chip design consortium to the Superconducting Super Collider--California officials are counting on this somewhat arcane physics project to help turn their luck around.
“California needs to sustain the scientific and engineering firepower that makes this kind of project possible,” said UC Davis Chancellor Theodore L. Hullar, chairman of the California Council on Science and Technology. “If we don’t, the scientists and engineers will move away. That is not how to compete for high-paying, high-technology jobs in today’s economy.”
Without the B Factory project, the Stanford accelerator laboratory probably would lay off 200 to 300 of its 1,500 employees in 1994, said Michael Riordan, assistant laboratory director. Another 200 to 300 jobs could be in danger in later years as research programs wind down. Additional jobs may vanish at companies that supply the lab, he said.
Cornell has the advantage in competing for the new research lab because it has been working with B mesons since 1980 and is the unquestioned world leader in B meson research. It also has an existing tunnel that Cornell researchers said would permit construction of a very efficient electron-positron accelerator, which is necessary for the experiment.
“This facility is closer to being a B Factory than any other facility in the world,” said Carl Berkelman, director of Cornell’s Laboratory for Nuclear Studies. “It can be upgraded for less cost and at less risk.”
Researchers at Stanford’s Linear Accelerator Center contend that they should build the B Factory because both major components, the required asymmetric-beam accelerator and the detector that will study B meson decay, were designed in California. They also said SLAC, as the lab is known, has been the world leader in electron-positron particle accelerator design since lab workers built the first such machine 30 years ago.
“We have the expertise, we have the experience and we have a federal (science) facility in which the government already has invested $1 billion,” said Richter, adding that SLAC has its own tunnel ready and waiting for the project. “It seems to me we should get our money’s worth out of it.”
A federal review panel that analyzed costs, experience and other factors related to choosing a B Factory site submitted its report to Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary last week. Members of the five-person committee, including two from the University of California system, declined to discuss their confidential findings.
Department of Energy officials will use those findings to recommend a B Factory location to Congress, which is considering a Clinton Administration proposal to spend $36 million to start engineering and construction in 1994. Energy Department spokesman Jeff Sherwood in Washington said O’Leary has not decided when to announce her recommendation.
The Asymmetric B Factory is an unlikely savior of California’s technological base. Its goal is to help scientists figure out what happened to all the antimatter produced in the Big Bang that created the universe. Scientists want to know why antimatter did not annihilate all ordinary matter, leaving behind a soup of pure energy.
In short, why is there enough ordinary matter for stars and planets when theories say there should not be?
According to theories, matter and antimatter essentially are mirror images of each other and would have been created in equal amounts by the Big Bang. They should have recombined--and dissolved into pure energy--shortly thereafter.
The fact that this did not happen is one of the fundamental puzzles of particles physics and cosmology.
“It is the reason we are allowed to exist,” said Burton Richter, director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. “Without it, we’d have a universe of pure radiation--no matter, no stars, no planets . . . and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Theories that try to explain how atoms work cannot account for the mystery. “Yet, it is so important to science that most scientists believe there must be something fundamental to matter to cause it,” he said.
Researchers want to explore this antimatter anomaly by studying the subatomic B mesons and their antimatter mate, known as B-bars. Hundreds of millions of each particle are needed for study, so the U.S. Department of Energy has agreed to build a B Factory to make them.
The factory would be based on a design developed by physicist Pierre Oddone at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a national research center affiliated with UC Berkeley. It would create B mesons by smashing negatively charged electrons into positively charged antimatter positrons.
These bits of matter and antimatter would travel in opposite directions at different speeds--an asymmetric arrangement that should scatter the resulting B and B-bar mesons in a way that would make them easier to study, Richter said.
Matter and antimatter versions of the B meson are known to be unusually distinctive. By studying the difference between them, scientists hope to understand why ordinary matter appears to be so much hardier.
Antimatter Album
Ordinary matter is only half of the subatomic particle zoo. Each species of ordinary matter was created with an antimatter mate that should have annihilated it long ago. Figuring out how ordinary matter avoided annihilation is hard to understand. But a few definitions might help:
* Matter: Ordinary stuff of the universe, from subatomic particles to massive stars. Matter consists of mass endowed with such properties as charge, flavor or color. Ordinary matter is found throughout the universe and some has lasted for billions of years.
* Antimatter: Has the same mass as ordinary matter, but is opposite in every other way. For example, a positively charged positron is the antimatter version of an ordinary electron. Antimatter can be created in the lab, but does not last long. Scientists do not know why.
* B meson: An elementary particle larger than an electron but smaller than a proton. Believed to help hold protons and neutrons together in the nuclei of atoms. B mesons are one particular type. They are used to study antimatter because of the way they decay.
* B Factory: An asymmetric particle accelerator that would smash together large bunches of electrons and positrons to create hundreds of millions of B mesons and antimatter B mesons.
* Asymmetric accelerator: Two loops of pipe surrounded by magnets that cause electrons and positrons to spin in circles, gaining speed before colliding. It is asymmetric because one type of particle is accelerated faster than the other.
